Syntax Highlighting – Posterous vs. Tumblr

Micro-blogging seems to be all the rage lately, so I’ve been comparing Posterous and Tumblr.

Because I’m a programmer, I occasionally post code to my (micro)blogs.  As part of my comparison, I checked to see how syntax highlighting (providing nice formatting and colors for code samples) is handled in these 2 services.

Example:


#include <stdio.h>

int main() 
{
    printf("hello, world");
    return 0;
}


Tumblr solution to syntax highlighting:

1. Include links to CSS and Javascript in your template’s HTML
2. Disable the Rich-Text editor
3. Disable the ‘Filter HTML’ feature
4. Create all new posts (and code) in raw HTML

[Source]

Posterous solution to syntax highlighting:

1. Just wrap your code sample with [ code ]…[ /code ]

[Source] – [Alternative]

–

Posterous wins this contest hands down.  

Any web content publishing system that requires me to regularly type raw HTML has failed its primary task.  The reason I’m using a web content publishing system is because I don’t want to use Notepad & FTP.  I want to focus on creating content, not creating markup.  

Kudos to Posterous for providing a nice solution to this challenge.